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Even the simplest of peasants, though, can hardly avoid the contradictions between V.C. propaganda and fact. Though the Communists claim to drive out bad government, soon after they capture a village there is usually a marked decline in public services: schools close down, medical aid disappears, roads are cut and sabotaged. As they liberate the peasants from Saigon's "oppression," the Viet Cong demand far more than Saigon would dare ask. Taxes are several times higher, and though the Viet Cong rail against the government's draft laws, which conscript young men at 20 for three years' service, the Communists take boys as young as 14 and 15 for service until the end of a war that they predict may last another 20 years. Promises of a better life and a certain Viet Cong victory are belied almost daily by the burgeoning graves of Communist dead.
In the end, the credibility gap is closed by violence. Last week a Viet Cong tossed a grenade into the living room of a village chief on Danang Bay. They killed a member of a government propaganda team distributing leaflets in Quang Nam province. They kidnaped two elders from a hamlet less than a mile from Hue. And they shot a villager in a hamlet in Thua Thien as a lesson to all the villagers not to vote in South Viet Nam's presidential elections. It was all in a week's work of governing, Viet Cong-style.
The Structure of Command. Each Viet Cong guerrilla is a cog in a complicated, disciplined command structure. At the apex in Hanoi sits Ho Chi Minh and his top political commissar, Le Duan, 59, who handles overall strategy for Ho's revolution. Also in Hanoi is Lieut. General Nguyen Van Vinh, 50, who directs the southward flow of men and supplies. It is to him that COSVN reports. Until he died last month, General Nguyen Chi Thanh commanded COSVN, aided by at least six other
North Vietnamese generals stationed in the South. COSVN keeps a close watch on all the military and political activities of the Communists in South Viet Nam; its authority is ensured by the fact that even in Viet Cong regular units, one-third of all the officers at battalion level and above are from North Viet Nam—not indigenous guerrillas.
The relationship between the Liberation Army and the political activities of the National Liberation Front is equally tightly controlled. The power-wielding part of the Front is the People's Revolutionary Party, the southern branch of Ho's Lao Dong Party that the Hanoi journal Hoc Tap calls "the soul of the N.L.F." Its five regional committees, .supervising the five areas into which COSVN has divided South Viet Nam, are each headed by a man with military experience. From province to district to village committee, and on down to hamlets where everyone has both a military and civilian job to do, everyone takes his orders from overhead, meaning ultimately from Hanoi. The organization embraces all.
The Wages of Sin. At local levels, the Viet Cong bureaucracy has some obvious virtues. Whereas the South Vietnamese government tends to pull the best civil servants into Saigon and sends the worst to hardship duty in the boondocks, the Viet Cong, with only hardship